Posts Tagged ‘Martin Heidegger’

Stefan Gandler’s volume Critical Marxism in Mexico investigates the radical political philosophy of two twentieth-century exiles who became naturalized citizens of Mexico: the Spanish Marxist Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (1915-2011) and the Ecuadorean leftist Bolívar Echeverría (1914-2010). Focusing on Latin America, this text places at its center the philosophical and practical critique of Eurocentrism. Indeed, the German Gandler envisions the book as being an initial step toward “overcoming Eurocentric bigotry,” and he declares that he is “profoundly convinced that Eurocentrism in its ‘philosophical’ and general forms […] is one of the principal reasons for the current disaster that humanity is living through at the global level,” considering its responsibility for vast material suffering and for repressing alternative forms of social organization. Given that Eurocentrism underpins capitalism, the critique of Eurocentrism in turn forms a central pillar of the “critical Marxism” developed by Sánchez Vázquez and Echeverría, in terms of their repudiation of the racism and positivism evinced at times by Marx, Engels, and many who have claimed Marxism. This alternative Marxism is critical also in that it is anti-Stalinist, non-Marxist-Leninist, relatively libertarian, and non-dogmatic.

Sánchez Vázquez is more practical, more revolutionary, and more based in Marx’s philosophical-humanist early writings than Echeverría, his fellow radical exile who took up residence in Mexico City in 1968, nearly three decades after Sánchez Vázquez arrived there as a refugee fleeing Franco’s victory in Spain. According to Gandler, the trajectory of Sánchez Vázquez’s life demonstrates that of the self-emancipation of a formerly orthodox socialist from intellectual error without his becoming a reformist or apologist or “forgetting the radical critique of everything existing which would be unthinkable without Marx.” For Sánchez Vázquez, theoretical knowledge depends on social transformation through praxis, defined by Marx in the “Theses on Feuerbach” as “revolutionary, practical-critical activity.” Theory, in Sánchez Vázquez’s view, “cannot exist […] without reference to praxis.” The Spanish thinker considers Marx’s very emphasis on praxis the German communist’s philosophical revolution, as summarized in the well-known final thesis: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Such immersion in Marx’s early writings strengthened Sánchez Vázquez’s resolve to resist the Soviet Union’s corruption of Marxism, as seen in the philosopher’s critique of Diamat in his 1955 masters thesis, and his resignation from the Communist Party following Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth Soviet Congress (1956). The Cuban Revolution, the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Prague Spring, and the Mexican student movement of 1968 greatly moved Sánchez Vázquez. His doctoral dissertation and book Philosophy of Praxis (1967) provide a libertarian presentation of Marxism that is critical of Marx, Lenin, and their followers. Such an unorthodox interpretation led Sánchez Vázquez to be criticized precisely by Marxist-Leninists such as the Cuban Jorge Luis Acanda Gonzalez, who condemned the thinker in 1988 for denying the “importance of Lenin’s political & philosophical legacy” and advancing “practical and spontaneous conceptions of the revolution.” Yet Sánchez Vázquez’s very stress on praxis—echoing Marx—led him to become one of the foremost intellectuals of emancipation of his time. He engaged with the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and focused his late efforts on Marxism and aesthetics, identifying the need for “a new sensibility, a new audience, a new aesthetic attitude” to be cultivated in post-revolutionary Cuba and more broadly. Sánchez Vázquez summarizes his philosophy in his 1985 autobiography, declaring that “socialism […] continues to be a necessary, desirable, and possible alternative.”

In contrast, Echeverría tells Gandler that, while he “agreed fully” with Sánchez Vázquez’s “critical vision of Marxism,” he was not his contemporary’s follower or disciple. Whereas Sánchez Vázquez privileges emancipatory consciousness and praxis, Echeverría focuses more on ordinary consciousness and is skeptical about the possibilities of praxis. For this reason, for him, it is more a “question of discovering political possibilities within alienation.” Influenced by Heidegger, Echeverría traveled to West Germany in 1961 to study with him, for he considered the phenomenologist to be “the true revolutionary” philosopher. Gandler rightly takes issue with Echeverría’s failure to recognize Heidegger’s enthusiasm for the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany, in parallel to the thinker’s questionable reflections on the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In addition, Gandler discusses Echeverría’s questionably uncritical stance on the USSR, situating it as being typical of the Latin American left at the time, which considered the Soviet Union a necessary counterbalance to US imperialism. Nonetheless, despite these problematic aspects, Echeverría developed a revolutionary concept of the intellect, which he believed must “abandon the European-bourgeois principles and ideology to complete philosophically the definitive process of decolonization, which is demanded practically by the dominated classes.” In this sense, the Ecuadorean philosopher considered Marxism “the “philosophy of workers’ struggle, the culmination and overcoming of all metaphysical European traditions.”

Yet to the matter of the fall—or, rather, destruction—of the Berlin Wall that took place on November 9, 1989, Gandler criticizes Echeverría for his perceived celebration in the Cuadernos Políticos he edited of the smashing of the “anti-fascist protective barrier,” as it was known in East Germany, on the fifty-first anniversary of Kristallnacht. In contrast to the dominant narrative of that historical event as being liberatory or anti-authoritarian, Gandler frames it as the action of a hysterically reactionary, State-sanctioned mob that sought to tear down an “unwanted monument to the millions” murdered in impunity by the Nazis. This lucid and challenging assessment yields at times in the text to questionable endorsements of the claims made by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) regarding the putatively enthusiastic participation of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans in the genocide of the European Jews (Ha’Shoah), as based in the idea of an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” supposedly deeply-rooted in German civilization and Christianity. These historical distortions about German participation in the Holocaust have been refuted adroitly by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn in their Nation on Trial (1997), and it is unfortunate to see Gandler resurrect them within a revolutionary analysis of genocide. Nevertheless, continuing in this sense, he shares Echeverría’s moving commentary on the Shoah as being, rather than merely “an accidental holocaust provoked by a madman,” the “result of a failure of the Left itself: the excessive sacrifice to be paid by the social body for the triumph of the anti-communist counter-revolution in the Europe of bourgeois civilization.”

In light of the genocides for which capitalism bears responsibility, the notion of praxis takes on a special urgency. In the “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx defines praxis as revolutionary because it “transforms reality.” The stress that Sánchez Vázquez places on this category echoes that previously made by Gramsci, who referred to Marxism in his Prison Notebooks as the “philosophy of praxis” in order precisely to recognize the centrality of revolutionary activity to this philosophy. Praxis poses a great threat to authority, capital, and the State precisely because it represents the ever-present risk of the “spontaneous rebellion of the oppressed and exploited” beyond the strictures of the Iron Cage. As Gandler declares, “[t]he concept of praxis […] contains an element of rebellion against all those who, from their desk, from the Party headquarters, or from the workers’ fatherland, aspire to lead the activities of the rebels of all countries.”

In parallel to Sánchez Vázquez’s emphasis on praxis, Echeverría contributes to the deepening of a non-dogmatic Marxism by criticizing Marx, Engels, and many of their followers for their ethnocentrism, naïve progressivism, and determinism—this, while dialectically acknowledging the clearly emancipatory and revolutionary analyses pervading Marxian analysis. After all, as Gandler stresses, it was Marx’s horror at “the destruction of human existences, of children, of the populations of entire regions” that led him to “pic[k] up his pen and wr[i]te Capital” (1867). Yet Marx and Engels, particularly early on, held racist views that are not totally inseparable from their overall method: in 1849, after the U.S. defeated Mexico and appropriated the Southwest, Engels hailed the result, which he considered to have been “waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization,” as California had been “taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it.” Moreover, Marx and Engels employed anti-Slavic prejudice during their struggle against Mikhail Bakunin and the anarchists in the First International—doubtless in part in response to Bakunin’s own Germanophobia—while both Marx and Bakunin are known for their anti-Semitic comments, however much worse the latter’s were.

For his part, Echeverría uses Marxist analysis to theorize that the oppressed countries of the Global South are not in a “pre-capitalist phase,” but rather that they have been fully subjected to capitalism since its birth. In this sense, all the world’s countries are capitalist, but the system of accumulation requires differing levels of industrialization and political power for different regions. Moreover, the philosopher takes issues with the deterministic, mechanical interpretation of history that Marx and Engels bequeathed to the world, and he outright claims Revolution to be a modern myth and a mirror-image of bourgeois delusion. Thus, whereas he clearly identifies the twentieth century as the “era of unprecedented genocides and ecocides” and wishes for an egalitarian universalism of all peoples, Echeverría is left with only conceptually envisioning the chance for a non- or post-capitalist modernity.

Echeverría identifies four ethe, or cultural spirits, as upholding Eurocentrism and capitalist modernity.

The currently dominant realist ethos, which is associated with Nordic-Protestant Europe, defined as principally engaging in denial regarding the destructiveness of capitalism precisely while it pretends that production and consumption are more important than anything else. It also denies the possibility of an alternative world.

The classic ethos, associated with Western Europe, which differs from realism only in terms of its recognition of the tragedy but necessity of capital.

The romantic ethos, associated with Central Europe, which supposedly transforms all of life under capitalism into a great adventure wherein entrepreneurs become heroes.

The baroque ethos, associated with the Mediterranean region, Catholicism, and the Iberian conquest of the New World, which is said to identify some of the contradictions in capitalist society but not be able to conceive of the possibility of abolishing it.

Perhaps a combination in the surge of realistic-romantic sentiments can help explain the recent election of Trump, bolstered by white nationalism—while Clinton and Obama’s concession speeches could be considered expressions of the classic ethos. Yet Echeverría can justly be critiqued for reducing Romanticism to an approach that naturalizes capitalism and oppression, for it certainly has served to propagate liberatory impulses. Writing in the text’s prologue, Michael Löwy is right to declare that the Romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Hölderlin, William Morris, Ernst Bloch, and others is hostile to capitalism, not integral to it.

In sum, Gandler has provided his readers an illuminating investigation into critical Marxism, the necessity of praxis, and the critique of Eurocentrism. Yet the question must be raised, as the author does, of just how anti-Eurocentric it is to explore the thought of two intellectuals—one of them Spanish—who focused above all on European writers. This doubt notwithstanding, in a world in which the Western core-imperial societies are lurching evermore to right-wing reaction, fascism, and “open-self destruction,” it may well be the case, as Gandler asserts, that only movements from the periphery will be able to stop the capitalist death-train. It is to be hoped, then, that resistance elements in imperialist countries can join with their international comrades to advance the cause of critical Marxism or libertarian socialism, which “continues to be the most fertile theory for those of us who are convinced of the need to transform the world in which today there exists not only the exploitation and oppression of [humanity] and peoples, but also a mortal risk for the survival of humanity [and nature].”

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. Originally published on Sept. 13th, 2016

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution presents a fascinating historical account of the process whereby the despotic Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was overthrown by the Iranian masses in 1978-79, only to yield a dictatorial Islamist regime led by reactionary clerics. The transition to the Islamic Republic, ruled over by Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi Khomeini, found the unlikely support of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher well-known for his anti-authoritarian critique of Western modernity, who expressed great enthusiasm for the Shi’ite Islamist elements of the Revolution in a number of public articles he wrote about the fall of the Shah, as based on the two visits he made to Iran in 1978.

Afary and Anderson observe that, while many progressives and leftists — both in Iran and elsewhere — favored the Revolution against the Shah but could not countenance the notion of an Islamic Republic replacing such despotism, Foucault was less critical toward Khomeini and the possibility of clerical rule. The authors argue that Foucault’s attitude in this sense — rather than signify some aberration or lapse in judgment — indeed follows from his post-structuralist political theorizing, which rejects the Enlightenment and despairs at the historical possibility of emancipation. As such, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution serves as an important warning for Western radicals and intellectuals vis-à-vis revolutionary movements, anti-imperialism and political authoritarianism in the rest of the world. Moreover, it raises questions about the liberatory potential of post-structuralism, detailing how that tendency’s preeminent spokesperson so clearly betrayed Iran’s workers, women, LGBTQ citizens, dissidents and religious and ethnic minorities by romanticizing what French leftist Maxime Rodinson refers to as “a type of archaic fascism.”

In their investigation of Foucault’s relationship with the Iranian Revolution, Afary and Anderson situate the philosopher’s writings within the context of the rejection of modernity he advances in works like Madness and Civilization (1961) and Discipline and Punish (1975). In this way, the authors hold that Foucault privileges pre-modernism, irrationalism and traditionalism — and therefore patriarchal domination. In fact, Foucault was not very attuned to feminist concerns, as is clearly seen in the October 1978 essay, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming About?” Here, the writer uncritically cites the vision of a future Iranian Islamic state in which there would supposedly not be any “inequality with respect to rights” between men and women, but “difference, since there is a natural difference.” Beyond this, in certain ways, the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini can be said to typify the “will to power” developed by Friedrich Nietzsche, the authoritarian irrationalist whose thought was central to Foucault’s worldview, as was that of Martin Heidegger, the Nazi-friendly phenomenologist whose concept of “being toward death” resonated with Foucault. The authors have a point, then, in observing that “Foucault’s affinity with the Iranian Islamists […] may also reveal some of the larger ramifications of his Nietzschean-Heideggerian discourse.”

Psychologically and philosophically, Foucault found the 1978 mass-demonstrations against the Shah that re-enacted the historical drama of the battle of Karbala (680 CE) and the martyrdom there of Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad revered by Shi’ites, highly compelling. For Afary and Anderson, Foucault’s attraction to the Iranian Revolution can be explained by the common interests the philosopher shared with many of the insurgents in terms of traditionalism, anti-imperialism and death. During the Revolution, the mourning celebrations of Muharram and Ashura, which commemorate the death of Hussein ibn Ali, his family and followers at the hands of the Sunni Umayyad dynasty, saw Shi’ite Islam being interpreted to emphasize the righteousness of masses of people electing to give their lives for the cause of overthrowing the Shah. Indeed, the principal intellectual forerunner of the Iranian Revolution, Ali Shariati, stressed martyrdom as the defining element of Shi’ism: Alavid or “red Shi’ism” (that of Hussein ibn Ali) against Safavid (institutionalized) or “black Shi’ism.” Shariati’s view is that all generations are invited to give up their lives in the struggle if they cannot kill their oppressors.

While Shariati did not live to see the Revolution he inspired, the major uprisings of September 1978 followed his predictions, as scores of protesters were killed in the streets by the Shah’s security forces on “Black Friday” (September 8). Thereafter, general strikes were launched in various industries and the Shah’s end drew precipitously closer. Foucault was deeply struck by these mobilizations involving hundreds of thousands of people, seeing in them the total “other” of established Western society. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the advance of the Revolution through Islamist “political spirituality” led him to disregard the secularist and left-wing elements participating in the movement as less authentic than the expressly Shi’ite protestors, and in fact to declare that the collective political will of the Iranian people was entirely unified by political Islam and a generalized love for the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini.

In the aforementioned article regarding Iranian dreams, Foucault also embarrassingly reproduces a line from a cleric stipulating that Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities — Kurds, Jews, Baha’is, Zoroastrians — would be respected insofar as their lives did not “injure the majority.” This lapse, together with the anti-feminist sentiment Foucault reproduced in the same essay, led an Iranian woman named “Atoussa H.” to call him out publicly. In a letter to Le Nouvel Observateur published in November 1978, Foucault’s critic issued a warning about the philosopher’s romanticization of Islamism and the prospect of an Islamic State in Iran, noting that, “everywhere outside Iran, Islam serves as a cover for feudal or pseudo-revolutionary oppression.” Atoussa H. despaired at the prospect of having the reign of the bloody Shah merely yield to religious fanaticism. Foucault’s public reply to Atoussa H. was condescending and evasive — rather than respond to the woman’s concerns, Foucault accused her feminism of being Orientalist.

In his writings from late 1978, moreover, the intellectual provided significant ideological cover to Khomeinism, claiming the Shi’ite clergy to be non-hierarchical and reassuring his readers that “there will not be a Khomeini party” or a “Khomeini government.” Some months later, after the Shah’s abdication and the “victory” of the Revolution, Foucault announced that “religion’s role was [merely] to open the curtain,” and that now, “the mullahs will disperse.” Meanwhile, Rodinson publicly challenged Foucault’s delusions on Iran in Le Monde, arguing that the domination of the Revolution by clerical elements threatened to merely have one form of despotism be succeeded by another. In parallel, Iranian Marxists and the Fedayeen guerrillas made known their unease at the prospect of the same.

The oppressive nature of the clerical regime that Foucault had helped to legitimize became readily evident after February 1979. Upon his return from exile, Khomeini moved swiftly to overturn established laws protecting women’s rights, and on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1979, he announced that all Iranian women were obligated to wear the chador. Such actions led masses of women to mobilize on the very same day to denounce the incipient dictatorship, declaring ironically that, “In the Dawn of Freedom, We Have No Freedom.” Their courage as women rebelling against a new “revolutionary” order was hailed from afar by Simone de Beauvoir and Raya Dunayevskaya — but not by Foucault. Neither did the philosopher in question speak out after the new regime’s summary executions of political opponents and men accused of homosexuality became evident, to say nothing of the state’s attacks on the Kurds and Baha’is. Such silence led yet another critique of Foucault on Iran to be written, this time by Claudie and Jacques Broyelle. As they argue: “When one is an intellectual, when one works both on and with ‘ideas,’ when one has the freedom […] not to be a sycophantic writer, then one also has some obligations. The first one is to take responsibility for the ideas that one has defended when they are finally realized.”

Foucault’s public response to the Broyelles was as unsatisfying as his response to Atoussa H.: dismissive and opportunistic. While it is true that Foucault came in passing to acknowledge the chauvinistic and nationalistic aspects of the Iranian Revolution — and even questioned in the end whether it could be considered a Revolution, as it had installed a “bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy” — his stance toward Khomeini and the Islamic Republic was “fundamentally a stance of support,” as Afary and Anderson conclude. From June 1979, by which time the regressive nature of theocratic rule had become undeniable, to the time of his death in 1984, Foucault guarded silence on the question of Iran and the Revolution. Never did he recant his previous excitement about Shi’ite Islamism or plead forgiveness, much less express support for the Iranians who suffered so terribly under the very Islamic Republic for which he had served as an unwitting propagandist. On the contrary, Foucault in his writings on Iran advanced reactionary criticisms of human rights, democracy and feminism.

Post-Structuralism and Counterrevolution

The case of a renowned anti-authoritarian Western philosopher legitimizing the coming-to-power of a brutal theocratic ruling class in Iran raises a number of pressing questions. How could this have come to pass? In the first place, Afary and Anderson are right to observe that Foucault failed to grasp that “an anti-Western, religiously based system of power” could be as oppressive as fascism or Stalinism. His lapse in this sense owed in part to his ignorance and romanticization of political Islam in general and the thought of Ayatollah Khomeini in particular — for Khomeini in 1970 had already anticipated the despotism of the Islamic Republic with his text Velayat-e Faqih, which calls for clerical domination of the state. As has been mentioned above, as well, his attitude toward Iran was surely influenced by his affinities with traditionalist, non-Western elements.

In addition, nevertheless, Foucault’s unique philosophical proclivities likely played an important role. Post-structuralism rejects the “grand narratives” of socialism and historical progress, basing itself instead in the nihilist-irrationalist approach of Nietzsche, a thinker who argues in On the Genealogy of Morals that the French Revolution represented the victory of slave morality, ressentiment and the supposed power of “Judea” over Roman virility, centralism and imperialism. It is arguably Foucault’s pseudo-radical innovation of post-structuralism that set him apart from the rest of the global progressive movement on Iran; earlier that decade, in his debate with Noam Chomsky, the philosopher had already rejected anarcho-syndicalism. Moreover, according to Edward Said, he sided with Israel over the Palestinians, losing his close friend Gilles Deleuze in the process. In truth, one need only review Foucault’s shameful attitude toward a clerical-fascist regime that executed more than 20,000 citizens — many of them gay people and guerrillas — during the remainder of Khomeini’s lifetime to see the regressive qualities of his post-structuralism manifesting themselves clearly.

Beyond this, Afary and Anderson do recognize and commend Foucault’s activism and organizing in favor of prisoners, the Polish Solidarity Movement and the Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing Stalinist victory in Southeast Asia, but they argue that the Iranian Revolution formed a much more central commitment in the life of the philosopher. Foucault’s delusions regarding Iran mirror the serious errors expressed by several left-wing intellectuals in history — Albert Camus, for example, who rejected Algerian independence from the French Empire, or the numerous thinkers who lent their support to the Soviet Union and Maoist China — and they are well-critiqued by Dunayevskaya’s denunciation of observers of the Iranian Revolution who prioritized anti-imperialism over internal oppression. Such considerations remain very much germane today, particularly with regard to the catastrophe in Syria, where the Islamic Republic has played a most oppressive role together with Russia in propping up the fascistic Assad regime.

The online entry for my forthcoming volume Eros and Revolution: The Critical Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse(Brill Publishers/Haymarket Books) has now been created. The eightieth-sixth title in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences (SCSS) series, the work will be available this summer through Brill in hardcover, and approximately a year later in paperback edition with Haymarket. The summary follows:

In Eros and Revolution, Javier Sethness Castro presents a comprehensive intellectual and political biography of the world-renowned critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Investigating the origins and development of Marcuse’s dialectical approach vis-à-vis Hegel, Marx, Fourier, Heidegger, and Freud as well as the central figures of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Adorno, Neumann, Fromm, and Benjamin—Sethness Castro chronicles the radical philosopher’s lifelong activism in favor of anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-authoritarianism together with Marcuse’s defiant revindication of global libertarian-socialist revolution as the precondition for the realization of reason, freedom, and human happiness. Beyond examining Marcuse’s revolutionary life and contributions, moreover, the author contemplates the philosopher’s relevance to contemporary struggle, especially with regard to ecology, feminism, anarchism, and the general cause of worldwide social transformation.

2. Early Years: Childhood and Youth, War and Revolution, Romanticism, Utopian Socialism, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger

Childhood and Youth, War and RevolutionPost-War Investigations: Aesthetics, German Romanticism, and HegelFriedrich Schiller and Charles Fourier: Utopian SocialismMarcuse’s Torturous Relationship with HeideggerHeideggerian MarxismHegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932)Hitler’s Accession and Flight of the Marcuse Family and the Frankfurt School

3. Militant Theorizing in Resistance to Fascism, 1933-1945Negations (1934-1938)Studies on Authority and FamilyMarcuse’s Direct Investigations of NazismEarly Theories of Social ChangeThe Progression of Marcuse’s Thought on Art’s Functions Under FascismReason and Revolution (1941)

4. State, Freud, and Orphic Marxism: 1945-1960Post-War Studies: “33 Theses,” Francis Bacon, Lukács, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderin, and ErasmusContinued Investigations of Historical Progress, Russian Studies, and the Trajectory of Communism and Reason during the Early Cold WarOn Sartre’s ExistentialismOrphic Marxism and the Struggle of Eros against ThanatosLectures on Freedom and Progress in Freud’s Theory of the InstinctsMarcuse’s Debate with Fromm on Freud, Therapy, and AdjustmentSoviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)The Ideology of Death

5. Radical Struggle in the 1960sMarcuse on CubaContinued Engagement with Critical Theorists and Lecture on WeberHumanism, Feminism, and RevolutionCritical Reflections on Science and TechnologyOne-Dimensional Humanity: Diagnosis, Reflections, and RecommendationsMarcuse on Marx, Louis Napoleon, and BenjaminJustification of Revolutionary Praxis: “Repressive Tolerance,” “Ethics and Revolution,” Guerrilla Warfare, “The Question of Revolution,” and “Thoughts on the Defense of Gracchus Babeuf”Psychoanalytical InterventionsActivism against the Vietnam WarSummer 1967 Lectures before the German SDS and Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation: On Utopia, Radical Opposition, and Violence1968: A New Dawn for Humanity?An Essay on Liberation (1969)Other Interventions from 1969: On Student Protest, “The Relevance of Reality,” Qualitative Change, and Self-DeterminationThe 1969 Debate with Adorno on Theory and PraxisRevisiting “Repressive Tolerance” and Civil Rights with the ACLU and Fred Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade“Marxism and the New Humanity: An Unfinished Revolution”“Freedom and the Historical Imperative”

6. Marcuse’s Final Decade: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Intensification (1970-1979)Marcuse’s Assessment of the State of the Radical Opposition in the Early 1970s: “Cultural Revolution,” “The Movement in a New Age of Repression,” and “A Revolution in Values”Revolution or Reform? Marcuse’s Debate with PopperCounterrevolution and Revolt (1972)Marcuse’s Late Championing of FeminismInternational Relations: Vietnam and Israel/PalestineContinued Engagement with Aesthetics“It is Right to Revolt” and “Theory and Politics”: Late Discussions with Sartre and HabermasMarcuse’s Final Interventions in Life: On Political Violence, the New Left, the U.S. Bicentennial, “The Reification of the Proletariat,” Rudolf Bahro, Technology, and EcologyThe Aesthetic Dimension (1978)

8. Critique of MarcuseThe Limits to IntegrationThe Problem of Sources: Political Philosophy and EmpiricsMarcuse the EdelkommunistMarcuse the Zionist?Feminism, Gender, ErosConflicts with Poststructuralism and PostmodernismMarcuse on Authority and the Transition: Between Jacobinism and Anarchism

PART III: CONCLUSION

9. Marcusean Politics in the Twenty-First CenturyRadical Ecological PoliticsFeminist Socialism and Anarcha-FeminismThe “World Mind” in International Relations: Global Anti-AuthoritarianismMeans and Ends: The Question of Counter-ViolenceClose: Eros and Revolution

“One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge […]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a ‘practical science’ in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy—and this is the crucial point—into the concrete distress of human existence.”

– Herbert Marcuse, “On Concrete Philosophy” (1929)

From Thursday 7 to Saturday 9 November 2013, the fifth biannual conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society took place at the University of Kentucky (UK) in Lexington. With the theme this year being “Emancipation, New Sensibility, and the Challenge of a New Era: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy,” the conference opened space for 25 panels, three plenaries, and two keynote addresses dedicated to examining the thought of Marcuse’s Hegelian-Marxist critical theory and the myriad ways by which it might be applied to the difficulties of the present. The conference itself was co-sponsored by several UK departments, including philosophy, sociology, political science, international studies, and others, and UK philosophy professor Arnold Farr served as the conference’s host and master of ceremonies of sorts. As it was would have been difficult to attend all—let alone one-third—of the panels on offer at the conference over the course of its three days, this report-back will concentrate only on those I saw and found most stimulating. In the very first panel of the conference early on Thursday morning—some of which I missed, including Professor Robespierre de Oliviera’s intervention which had to do with the 2013 revolts in Brazil—Prof. Lauren Langman spoke to the “Interesting Times” in which we live. Reflecting on Marcuse’s 1963 lecture on the “Obsolescence of Freudian Man [Humanity]” 50 years later, he made the claim that the vast majority of people in the U.S. should now be considered as no longer having a Freudian character—that is to say, one whose ego and superego are formed through the primary conflict with the father-figure—but he stressed that Freudian analyses still retain importance in U.S. society, particularly as means of analyzing the Tea Party and emerging neo-fascist movements. Those individuals who make up these movements are conformists who resist change; as they are worried about losing their privileges, Langman claimed them to be beset by the “anal character” postulated by Freud. The professor contrasted these reactionary contemporary developments with the “Great Refusal” theorized by Marcuse a half-century ago, by which the human organism in its entirety is to rebel against organized destruction and alienation, in addition to the “SexPol” of fellow German social critic Wilhelm Reich, whereby the prospect of social liberation was to be improved by approaches which encouraged open and pleasurable sexual expression among adolescents. It should be noted here, as Langman did, that for such unorthodox views Reich was expelled from both the German Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytical Association—just as Marcuse was fired from Brandeis University in 1965 for his radical refusal to separate philosophy from its practical, revolutionary implications: the radical struggle (Radikalkampf) against domination. Returning to his analysis of the prevailing situation, Langman was happy to cite the December 2011 Pew Research Center polls indicating that about 50% of U.S. youth consider socialism preferable over capitalism. Acknowledging the very real risk of “planetary catastrophe” in this century because of the entrenched dominance of the capitalist mode of production, Langman closed his intervention by noting that the twenty-first century would like the twentieth face the choice of a liberatory socialism or a Mad Max sort of barbarism.After Langman’s talk came Andrés Ortiz Lemos’s intervention on “The Fata Morgana of Technology” within the “Citizen Revolution in Ecuador.” Presenting his paper on the subject, Ortiz Lemos sought to apply Marcuse’s critical analysis of instrumental rationality—or what Marcuse at times also terms technical rationality—to President Rafael Correa’s Ecuador. The process by which utilization of capitalist scientific methods leads inevitably to the reification of consciousness should not be considered as limited only to “advanced industrial” settings, argued Ortiz Lemos, for, in his argument, Correa has clearly employed science and technology as a means of silencing critics of his “Citizen Revolution.” As a prime example of this dynamic, Ortiz Lemos discussed Correa’s grandiose plan to build Yachay, or the “City of Knowledge” (Ciudad del Conocimiento) as a South American equivalent of sorts to Silicon Valley. The idea of Yachay, which has received the blessing of such scientific celebrities as Stephen Hawking, is to supplement Ecuador’s export of primary resources through extractivism with an ever-increasing export of advanced techno-knowledge. Naturally, as Ortiz Lemos discussed, Yachay is to be a highly exclusive institution, not one accessible to ordinary Ecuadoreans. Indeed, the speaker likened Correa’s plan for Yachay to Argentinian President Juan Perón’s fantastical scheme to green-light a plan hatched in 1950 by ex-Nazi scientists by which they would attempt to develop fusion power at a remote site in the Andes—as with Correa and Yachay, Perón employed the “technical rationality” represented by such a work toward the end of demobilizing his opponents. In closing, Ortiz Lemos contrasted the Correa government’s stipulated commitment to the indigenous concept of sumak kawsay, or “good-living,” given Correa’s increasingly techno-bureaucratic politics, and he noted in hopeful terms the strength of indigenous social movements in the country. Following the initial panel discussion on Marcuse and recent social movements came the panel “Ecology, Biopolitics, and Aesthetics,” which began with Brazilian doctoral student Silvio Ricardo Gomes Carneiro speaking to the aesthetic specters found in Marcuse’s work, from his very first scholarly work on The German Artist-Novel (1922), which examined the conflicts between the alienated artist and the surrounding capitalist society, to Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse’s famous synthesis of Marx and Freud, and beyond. For Gomes Carneiro, art in Marcuse’s conception constitutes a sort of guerrilla warfare against one-dimensional society and the administered life; at its best, aesthetics can help break the reification of consciousness. Professor Imaculada Kangussu followed by reflecting on Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969) with her talk on “The Aesthetic Ethos of Real Life.” Beginning dialectically by citing Augustine of Hippo’s saying that “Where the danger grows is also found what can save us,” Kangussu brought up Marcuse’s observation that radical political alternatives which are dismissed as “utopian” are considered so only because they are blocked from being realized by established power relations. According to Marcuse (and Kangussu), the struggle to bring to life the “utopian” possibilities of the present is one that takes place even and especially at the level of the individual organism, such that the individual’s progression beyond conformity to and complicity with the brutality and aggressiveness required under relations of domination serves as a forerunner prefiguring the overturning of such domination. In Marcuse’s view, as he famously develops it in the Essay on Liberation, morality is an inherent “’disposition’ of the organism,” one which works to counteract the grip of death (Thanatos) on the individual and societal levels.1 A sensitization to aesthetics can aid the organism to overcome established domination, as Kangussu argued (following Marcuse), for art is indelibly linked with the human imagination, which turns its focus onto “things that are not and things that should be.” In aiding in the development of a new human sensibility, aesthetics can assist emancipatory movements to realize liberation. Kangussu quotes Marcuse:

“This would be the sensibility of men and women who do not have to be ashamed of themselves anymore because they have overcome their sense of guilt: they have learned not to identify with the false fathers who have built and tolerated and and forgotten the Auschwitzs and Vietnams of history, the torture chambers of all the secular and ecclesiastical inquisitions and interrogations, the ghettos and the monumental temples of corporations, and who have worshiped the higher culture of this reality. If and when men and women act and think free from this identification, they will have broken the chain which linked the fathers and sons from generation to generation. They will not have redeemed the crimes against humanity, but they will have become free to stop them and to prevent their recommencement.”2

Transitioning to questions of ecology, Brandon Huson presented on agroecology as a form of “Food Production that Liberates.” He noted agroecological practices to be superior to dominant chemical-industrial ones, given their potential to be freed from market strictures and based on local knowledges. Additionally, he argued that observing agroecology could help considerably to reconstitute soils depleted by previous agricultural practices and pragmatically to improve crisis resilience for local communities in light of negating future eventualities such as oil-price shocks. I then presented my paper on “Ecology and Empire in Marx, Adorno, and Marcuse,”which I introduced by noting the “continued dire relevance of both such issues in our own day” and the “critical-dialectical perspectives” provided by these three theorists, which I believe “hold great promise in positive and practical terms with regard to the ongoing struggle to overturn capitalism and so resolve the threats to oppressed humanity and non-human nature taken together.” I began by considering Karl Marx’s views on imperialism, which are to a degree marred by the deterministic view that all non-capitalist societies of the world would have first to be subjected to the torturous path of capitalist industrialization as a precondition of later attaining communism—though he famously broke with this view late in life, particularly after studying ethnology and anthropology in depth. Marx ultimately came to conclude that the agricultural collectivism evinced for example in the Russian mir system presented an alternative that could allow for a direct path to communism, if those participating within the mir would be helped along by revolutionary proletarians in the West. Marx definitely presented some problematic views on the British Raj in India during his 1853-1858 journalistic work with the New York Tribune—views that would lead Edward W. Said to denounce him in Orientalism—yet he also precociously called for Indian independence from Britain long before any Indian nationalist had done so, and he certainly welcomed the 1857-1858 Sepoy Mutiny against the Raj. In Capital volume 1, moreover, Marx defines his theory of primitive accumulation in the following anti-imperialist fashion:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America; the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population; the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies; the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”3

Though greatly influenced by Marx, Theodor W. Adorno, on the other hand, did not share Marx’s impassioned humanism with regard to non-European peoples: it would seem that his social critique revolved principally around contemplation of the Shoah, such that the genocidal social exclusion imposed by fascism became primary within his thought, to the detriment of other important considerations. Adorno was unfortunately an unreflective Zionist, and he and his colleague Max Horkheimer called Gamel Abdel Nasser a “fascist chieftain” in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis.4 However, more than a decade later, Adorno rightly spoke of the “horror of the napalm bombs” dropped by the U.S. military in Vietnam, and he clearly locates the U.S. war against that country as being a crime which belongs within the fascist continuum responsible for Auschwitz. Though his anti-militarist position is far more legitimate than that of Horkheimer, who rather bizarrely supported the U.S. war effort, Adorno did not engage in any sort of concrete activism to resist the war drive during his last years of life in Germany, unlike Marcuse, who received several death-threats from right-wing groups in the U.S. due precisely to his opposition to the war and his agitating for radical social change more broadly. Marcuse himself considered national-liberation struggles as the most revolutionary developments on offer in the 1960s and 1970s, and he welcomed the coming of the Cuban and Chinese Revolutions. Marcuse also visited historical Palestine in 1971, and rather than parrot Zionist narratives at this time, his perspective as communicated in his Jerusalem Post article “Israel is Strong Enough to Concede” clearly acknowledges the vast injustices done to the native Palestinian population in the founding and maintenance of the Jewish State, and though he endorses Israel’s right to exist, he calls for Palestinian self-determination and just settlement of the refugees; he sees these “interim solutions” as stopgap measures which might lead one day to a Middle Eastern “socialist federation” in which Arabs and Jews would coexist as “equal partners.”5 During the visit he and his wife Inge made to Nablus in 1971, indeed, Marcuse expressed highly unorthodox views for a supporter of Israel, noting that, though he “had always felt sympathy toward Jews suffering persecution,” he “could find no sympathy for Jews who persecute others.”6In terms of ecology, I sought to express my opposition to recent interpretations of Marx’s thought which have stressed his supposed contributions as an ecologist, as most notably advanced in the writings of John Bellamy Foster, author of Marx’s Ecology, The Ecological Revolution, and The Ecological Rift, among other titles. I am very far from convinced that contemplation of Marx’s passing references to the depletion of soils resulting from the introduction of capitalist agricultural practices should lead us to embrace him as a trailblazing environmentalist. Instead, in my view, Marx was far more concerned with communist humanism than ecology; he was largely a Promethean who held a relatively positivist—uncritical—view of industrialism, and I am sympathetic to Adorno’s declaration that Marx wanted to “turn the whole world into a giant workhouse.”7 It is important not to confuse Marx’s industrialism with the utopian romanticism of Charles Fourier or Friedrich Schiller. Adorno himself, on the other hand, expressed much concern for the destructive effects capitalism and industry have had on non-human nature, and he would often champion animal rights and vegetarianism. Indeed, the question of the domination of nature is central to the entirety of his social philosophy, from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) to Aesthetic Theory (published posthumously in 1970). In the latter work, Adorno observes that experience of natural beauty “recollects a world without domination,” and he argues that, “under transformed relations of production,” technology could be employed to “assist nature” by reversing its destruction and even “on this sad earth [to] help it to attain what perhaps it wants.”8 Similarly, in his 1962 lecture “Progress,” Adorno presents a revolutionary definition of this concept, whereby it is to be attained only once humanity experiences an “awakening” which renders it capable of “becom[ing] aware of its own indigenousness to nature” and so “brin[ging] to a halt the domination it exacts over nature.”9 Lastly in this sense, environmentalism and concern for nature are rather evident in much of Marcuse’s mature works—his early, uncritical lapse on the nature-domineering philosophy of René Descartes in “The Concept of Essence” (1936) notwithstanding. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse integrates Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory with the mythological figure of Orpheus to suggest that, in a future emancipated society, nature and the non-human should be taken not as objects of exploitation and manipulation but rather as intrinsically valuable, and in both One-Dimensional Man (1964) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse argues for the importance of vastly reducing the suffering humanity imposes on non-human animals, though he stops short of endorsing vegetarianism in the latter work. Identifying nature as an “ally” in the struggle against capitalism in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Marcuse takes issue with the Marxian concept of a “human appropriation of nature”: though this is clearly preferable to capitalism’s utter destruction of the biosphere, Marcuse criticizes Marx for reflecting a “hubris of domination” in considering nature as an object to be controlled, and he reiterates his Kantian alternative of a nonexploitative relationship with nature in this sense.10 Following this panel, the next major event at the conference was Professor Richard Wolin’s keynote address on “Marcuse and the New Left: Emancipatory Violence as a Problem of Political Philosophy.” Wolin, author of Heidegger’s Children and co-editor of a collection of Marcuse’s writings from his period of study with Martin Heidegger, Heideggerian Marxism, used his comments to discuss a brief period in the 1960’s when Marcuse is said to have flirted with the concepts of revolutionary violence and of a transitional dictatorship away from capitalism (1964-1968). He opened by arguing that Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which famously theorizes the Marcusean pessimism which claimed the working classes of the advanced-industrial West to have been hopelessly integrated into the capitalist system, may well have over-exaggerated the claim that the established system enjoyed control over its subjects. Wolin noted that the negating fate of the German Revolution of 1918-1919 left Marcuse with a permanent distrust of liberalism, given that it was the reformist Social Democrats who ordered the insurgent proletarian and soldier movements at the end of World War I to be smashed; Wolin said that this experience indelibly left a gap in thought between Marcuse and the New Left in the U.S., even if Marcuse came to be known as the “guru” or even “father” of the New Left (terms he reportedly disliked); Wolin noted that the U.S. New Left was not so intransigently opposed to liberalist reformism. Marcuse’s view, then, that U.S. social institutions were politically unserviceable led him to hold out the need for an extra-systemic intervention; like Frantz Fanon, Marcuse saw this development—the veritable embodiment of the Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic—in the anti-colonial insurrections of the 1950’s and 1960’s: principally in Castro and Che as well as the Vietnamese resistance to the U.S. war. Meanwhile in Germany, student radical Rudi Dutschke applied Marcuse’s theories by holding the attainment of revolutionary progress to be a matter of will, given that the material conditions were already ripe for the jettisoning of capitalism; the idea, which influenced groups like the Weather Undeground and the Red Army Faaction (the Baader-Meinhof group), was that the national-liberation struggles must have parallel groupings in the metropole. It is doubtful that those attracted to Dutschke’s advocacy of direct action or “actionism” paid much heed in this sense to Jürgen Habermas’s much-reviled denunciation of a tendency he saw as leading toward “Left fascism” at this time. Within this tumultuous confluence of events and thought, argued Wolin, Marcuse came closer and closer to endorsing authoritarian methods of “forcing the people to be free”: from the lamentation over the pervasiveness of false consciousness and the identification of “totalitarian democracies” in the West as expressed in One-Dimensional Man, it was not so great of a leap to advocate revolutionary dictatorship as a temporary corrective of sorts. According to Wolin, Marcuse must have felt the risks of such a dictatorship to be less than those associated with liberal or Stalinist regimes; the speaker even cited Marcuse’s declaration in Eros and Civilization that, “From Plato to Rousseau, the only honest answer is the idea of an educational dictatorship, exercised by those who are supposed to have acquired knowledge of the real Good.” Curiously, though, Wolin failed to include Marcuse’s next sentence in his comments refuting the idea: “The answer has since become obsolete: knowledge of the available means for creating a humane existence for all is no longer confined to a privileged elite.”11 Wolin instead pressed on attempting to trace the influence of fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt on Marcuse’s thought during this period, as supposedly seen for example in Marcuse’s 1967 defense of the minoritarian insurrectional tactics of Gracchus Babeuf, who attempted to organize a “conspiracy” to forcibly overthrow the reactionary Directory in the final stages of the French Revolution (1796). Marcuse sides with Babeuf’s romantic project due to the belief the two share in the objective superiority of natural law over that of established law, coupled with their common view that “the people” can be ideologically misled, adopting conservativism, as many of the weary denizens of France arguably had by 1795. Wolin claims such considerations to form the basis of Marcuse’s justification of a revolutionary dictatorship—though, again, he failed here to mention the 1968 postscript to Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), where the critical theorist clearly states that the “alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intellectual and intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy.” It would seem, then, that Wolin proved disingenuous in at least some of his claims in this address, perhaps for controversy’s sake. He concluded by contrasting Marcuse’s supposed position on dictatorship in this period with the thought of Hannah Arendt, who theorizes the concept of power as people’s collective action in concert and considers violence the very antithesis of power—it is employed by states, for example, only when their control over their populations falters. Wolin also noted the “poor endings” of various radical currents within national-liberation or post-colonial movements, including the Naxalites, the Tamil Tigers, and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), and he favorably cited Gene Sharp’s work on active nonviolence as an alternative. Wolin made no mention of Sharp’s established ties with the CIA and the Pentagon.12Apropos, during the discussion period, Professor Harold Marcuse (Herbert’s grandson) brought up the advocacy of violent tactics made late in life by Günther Anders (1987), who was Arendt’s husband for a time and himself marginally associated with the Frankfurt School; Anders felt popular, revolutionary violence to have been a necessity amidst the early growth of the Nazi movement within Weimar Germany, and he similarly held it to be legitimate as a means of attempting to resolve the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, given the marked irresponsibility of the world’s states on this matter. One wonders what Anders would have to say about catastrophic climate change. This stimulus from Prof. Marcuse led Wolin lucidly to mention the “honorable tradition of tyrannicide”, a tradition that can be seen to have been exercised for example in Russia against Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and Prime Minister Pëtr Stolypin in 1911. The final event for the first day of the conference—its first plenary—involved the playing of a fascinating audio recording of an interview between Professors Jeremy and Richard Popkin regarding the latter’s recollections of Marcuse during the time he taught in the philosophy department at UC San Diego (1965-1976, with emeritus status from 1976 until his death in 1979). The elder Popkin, who founded UCSD’s Philosophy Department in 1963, first encountered Marcuse during a symposium he and his colleagues hosted in 1964 regarding the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought. This was a time which coincided with the publication of One-Dimensional Man and the heightening tensions between the mature radical intellectual and the administration overseeing him at Brandeis, which ultimately obliged Marcuse to “retire” following his open and public welcoming of the Cuban Revolution and his organizing of a class on campus to analyze the “Welfare-Warfare State.” At Popkin’s invitation after the 1964 Marx symposium—which itself generated a fair amount of controversy among the UC regents—Marcuse left Massachusetts to join the philosophy faculty at UCSD, settling in the rather unlikely locale of La Jolla, California, the grossly affluent neighborhood which served then (and still?) as a retirement destination for many ex-military officers, in addition to counting with the strong presence of the American Legion and plenty of other reactionary groups and individuals. As an illustration of the depth of the town’s conservatism, Popkin explained that over four-fifths of La Jolla’s residents voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Accompanying Marcuse in his move from the Northeast U.S. were several of his Brandeis graduate students, including Angela Y. Davis, who would receive her M.A. at UCSD in 1969, a year before Jonathan Jackson would take over a Marin County courtroom to demand the release of his imprisoned brother George Jackson, a confrontation that would lead to police killing him and imprisoning Davis for having bought the weapons Jackson used in the operation. During her studies in San Diego, though, Davis would assist with efforts to have a branch of the school renamed for anti-imperialist martyrs Patrice Lumumba and Emiliano Zapata. At UCSD, Marcuse taught both introductory and advanced philosophy courses, including the Social Philosophy course of 1967-1968 which Jeremy Popkin took as a student; according to the elder Popkin, students definitely liked the emigre German philosopher, and his classes were always well-attended. Rather inevitably, though, relations with local right-wing groups soon came to a head, with conservatives becoming initially alarmed upon learning of Prof. Marcuse’s brief departure to attend an international conference on Hegel in Czechoslovakia—that is, behind the Iron Curtain. At first, the American Legion pressured the UC administration to let Marcuse go, and when this tactic failed, the group boldly offered to buy Marcuse’s contract for $20,000. More grimly, in summer 1968 came the “Night of the Long Guns,” when, amidst a context beset by an increasing number of death-threats directed at Marcuse (including one from the KKK), the telephone line to the Marcuse household was mysteriously cut. This led to the mounting of a rapid response among Marcuse’s supporters and friends in La Jolla, with the somewhat amusing result that intrepid philosophy students armed themselves with shotguns and formed a protection detail to stay up through the night and watch over Herbert and Inge’s home. Fortunately, as Popkin recalls, the whole scare was a false alarm, and he speculated that the problem of the telephone line perhaps had to do with Inge’s failure to pay the utilities company on time. Besides his trip to the Hegel conference in Czechoslovakia, Marcuse traveled internationally quite a bit in his time at UCSD, visiting Germany to speak at the Free University of West Berlin in July 1967 and observing the evénéments of May-June 1968in Paris firsthand. Indeed, Jeremy Popkin recalls that, the very night Marcuse returned from revolutionary Paris, he gave students a two-hour presentation stressing the critical importance of the upsurge, yet urging them to recognize the great differences between French and U.S. societies at that time—such that their next move should not have been, for example, to storm LBJ’s White House! Popkin also shed light on Marcuse’s developing relationship with Israel, noting tensions on this question between him and Inge, who he claims to have been “very anti-Zionist” as well as effectively Maoist. One such controversy had to do with the Israeli ambassador’s personal request that Marcuse speak out publicly in favor of Jews facing repression in the Soviet Union, while another revolved around a call for notable public intellectuals to sign a statement declaring the Jewish State to desire peace in the Middle East, this less than a week before it attacked Egypt and so opened the Six Day War. Within this tumultuous national and international context, moreover, the newly elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan (1967-1975), was determined to remove Marcuse from the public eye. In no small part due to Reagan’s aggressive machinations, the UC at this time imposed the arbitrary rule that all professors older than 70 could not be promised contract renewals—with this being a threshold which Marcuse surpassed in 1969. Popkin observed that thinkers from Jean-Paul Sartre to Karl Popper wrote letters of recommendation in support of Marcuse’s bid to continue teaching in his last decade of life. Incidentally, these new regulations also affected another anti-war academic activist, the chemist Linus Pauling, who left UCSD for Stanford in 1969. Apparently, despite his well-known advocacy of social revolution, Marcuse insisted continuously during his time at UCSD that students not act in any way which might threaten the relative autonomy of the university, for he considered such to be their “safe space” in society. Both Popkins recall that Herbert was wont not to get overtly involved in political situations which might lead him to be arrested and so result in aggravated tensions with the Right and/or a jeopardization of his teaching position, but they did discuss one instance when Marcuse entered a UC space that had been occupied by protesting students, defended the occupation publicly, and offered to pay the trespassing fine the students had incurred for their action.The second day of the conference began with a plenary panel session on Crisis and Commonwealth: Marx, Marcuse, McClaren, a 2013 book edited by Marcuse scholar Charles Reitz which features original hitherto unpublished manuscripts by Marcuse together with interventions from various contemporary theorists who are, according to the book’s description, “deeply engaged with the foundational theories of Marcuse and Marx with regard to a future of freedom, equality, and justice.” Besides consideration of Marcuse and Marx, the title also includes a manifesto for radical educators written by the illustrious Peter McLaren.In his reflections on the volume, editor Reitz discussed the critical utopianism of Marcuse, as expressed well in the closing line on his dissertation on the German Artist-Novel: “We are in search of a new community.” Bringing Marcuse’s continued hopefulness to the present—in his essay “On Hedonism,” written in exile from Hitler, Marcuse writes of a “new, true community, against the established one”—Reitz held out the prospect for a rehumanized future that is within our grasp. Herbert’s son Peter then discussed a 1960s occupation of the institution where he currently teaches urban planning—Columbia University—taken by black revolutionaries together with more privileged radicals belonging to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Peter Marcuse explained that the former group sought practically to improve the material conditions of proletarian and oppressed communities in U.S. society, while SDS members wanted not “more” but rather something “other,” or different. Like his father, Marcuse suggested that both streams should be combined, so as to create alternative relationships among people. In terms of praxis, Marcuse for the present suggested an expansion of worker ownership as a means of securing better material conditions for workers and of developing relations of cooperation rather than competition generally within society, toward the end of giving rise to the commonwealth Reitz identifies in the title of his volume. Also on this panel, Professor Farr argued that there is currently no general commonwealth—no wealth held in common. Noting capitalism to be the crisis of history, Farr raised Kant’s argument against lying and recommended that theorists and activists reflect on the ways in which we lie to ourselves. During this morning, moreover, Prof. Farr playfully paraphrased the title of a 1968 panel discussion Marcuse participated in, saying that, while democracy doesn’t have a present, it could perhaps have a future. Besides a couple of presentations by Douglas Kellner and Peter-Erwin Jansen on recent publications of works researching Marcuse as well as on the forthcoming sixth volume of his collected Papers—attractively entitled Marxism, Revolution and Utopia—the rest of the following morning consisted of Prof. Andy Lamas discussing the concept of the “long march through the institutions” raised by Rudi Dutschke as an alternative to the “revolutionary terror” of the RAF. Stating his basic premise, Lamas argued that critical theory must be “anti-capitalist, democratic, participatory, and liberatory”; in his comments, he advanced the notion that the “long march” was a reformulation of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, part of the war of position against the capitalist class. Citing Angela Davis’s elucidation of Marcuse’s avowed support for the “long march” later in life, as in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Lamas spoke to Marcuse’s late views on social change, whereby groups might take the “mining” or “undermining” approach by which to work against established institutions from the inside. With a nod to Peter Marcuse’s intervention, Lamas also pointed to the recent rise of interest in consumer and worker cooperatives as well as the commons generally understood as an encouraging sign in this sense. During the subsequent discussion period, militant writer George Katsiaficas raised the point that Dutschke’s call for integrating into given institutions was a controversial point among leftists, then as now—especially for anarchists. Another participant pointed out that the question might not be one of working through established institutions but rather of building counter-institutions, and he mentioned the origins of the term of the “long march”: that is, the Long March taken by Mao and the Communists as a tactical retreat from the Guomindang so as to regroup and ultimately defeat Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces. Harold Marcuse ironically observed that right-wing social critics in the U.S. feel Marcuse’s “long march” has in fact been successful, given their delusions regarding the reportedly progressive nature of much of academia, the mass media, and Hollywood. During the afternoon of the conference’s second day, I attended a panel on “Marcuse, Marx, and Marxisms,” which began with the intervention of Fred Mecklenburg, who spoke to the influence of Hegel on Marx’s thought. Mecklenburg noted the critic Hegel as holding freedom to be the driving force of history, and the Absolute the struggle of humans to realize such freedom. While Marx would integrate such revolutionary notions into his conception of communism, he also famously criticized Hegel’s mature acquiescence to the bourgeois society of post-Napoleonic Europe; Marx the pupil does not accept the world dominated by commodity, indelibly linked with slavery and genocide. Mecklenburg observed that Marx was aware of and concerned with the course of the U.S. Civil War in his lifetime, though he seemed to be unfamiliar with the Lakota people’s resistance to the expanding U.S. settler-colonial state. Focusing his concluding comments on the present situation, the speaker claimed the specter of catastrophic colimate change to illuminate the continued relevance of “Absolute struggle.” Next, David Peña-Guzman addressed the “Marxism-Heideggerianism Tension” by noting Marcuse to have considered Martin Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus Being and Time as having the philosophical potential of displacing hegemonic positivism within a historical context in which the proletariat had yet to “fulfill its historical role”; Marcuse felt Heidegger’s stress on authenticity could be used as a supplement to the Marxist notion of class consciousness. Of course, when Heidegger publicly welcomed the coming of the Nazi regime in 1933, he forever forsook the possibility of remaining a great philosopher, and he expressly failed to clarify his relationship with National Socialism after its military defeat 12 years later, as Peña-Guzman discussed. In the speaker’s opinion, there are no clear politics or ethics to be discerned in Being and Time—a position similar to that of Marcuse, who in a 1977 interview re-evaluated his youthful admiration of the work, noting it to advance a “highly repressive” and “highly oppressive” view of human life, one that is “joyless” and “overshadowed by death and anxiety.”13 Karla Encalada Falconi followed with an intervention on Marx and Lacan on the “Comparison of the Impossible,” but I did not follow this well enough to be able to summarize her argument, other than to note her observation that Lacan considers separation a form of liberation, while for the young Marx separation is fundamental to his development of the concept of alienation. Lastly on this panel, Russell Rockwell, co-editor of the recently published Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978(2013), presented on the trajectories and intersections of the Marxisms advanced by Marcuse and critical psychoanalyst Erich Fromm respectively. Against established trends which would largely suppress consideration of Fromm’s significant contributions to the nascent Institute for Social Research, Rockwell explained how Fromm felt psychoanalysis could productively serve as a complement to Marxian economism, and he mentioned Fromm’s 1929 lecture to the Institute of Psychoanalysis which cited Marx favorably. He also brought up Fromm’s 1929 psychological study of workers in Weimar Germany, which was rejected for publication with the Institute for Social Research for practical political considerations—it held that some three-quarters of the German working population would not resist Hitler if he seized power, while only an estimated 15 percent had personality structures which Fromm felt would lead them to actively resist him. Indeed, the work did not see the light of day for over five decades. Rockwell stressed that both Fromm and Marcuse shared an interest in the humanism of the young Marx, unlike most of the rest of the theorists associated with the Frankfurt School. Lastly on the conference’s second day, Professor Cynthia Willett presented a keynote address on “Interspecies Ethics: Cosmopolitanism Across Species.” Reading from her forthcoming book of the same name, Willett sought to extend concern for the outcast from humans to non-human animals and to highlight some of the various ways animals resist the imposition of domination from their human exploiters—as in laughter, for example, which she claimed to be exhibited by many animals, including the macaw. Mentioning Franz de Waal’s (oppressive) observation of primates in confinement at Emory University, Willett dedicated part of her address to consideration of the bonobo, the “hippie” or “Marcusean” ape, which in its genetic closeness to humanity suggests the possibility for humans to behave in ways other than those demanded by capital. Speculatively, Willett assigned a hitherto unrecognized importance to the “gut brain” of humans—the enteric nervous system—which, as Donna Haraway argues, may produce indigestion in response to indulging in practices it considers disgusting, such as eating animal flesh or performing experimental testing on animals. (I will say here that her claim here was highly inauthentic in Marcusean and Heideggerian terms, given that she admitted to eating a beef hamburger before her address.) Willett argued for the criticality of disgust as a means of repudiating some of the ethically problematic practices imposed onto animals within late capitalism, such as the intensive factory farming. She also raised the case of a caged bonobo clearly expressing interspecies empathy, as seen in the gentle care it expressed for a bird that had fallen into its zoo habitat: the bonobo ultimately climbed to the top of the highest tree in the habitat and from there released the bird back into its own environment, beyond the confines of captivity. In closing, I will summarize the only panel I attended on the third and last day of the conference which I feel to be worth mentioning: one examining the Eros effect, as theorized by Marcuse’s student George Katsiaficas. First, Jason del Gandio defined the Eros effect as being the political expression of the life instinct (Eros) on the collective political level. Melding Marcuse’s insights with post-structuralism, he hypothesized the human body as having three defining characteristics relevant to radical inquiry: it is a sentient creature, a producer of reality, and one which emanates. Essentially, he argued that human bodies desire the resistance of inherited oppression by moving spontaneously, or of their own accord (emanations) . After del Gandio, AK Thompson, author of Black Bloc, White Riot, provided a highly original interpretation of the Eros effect, noting its activation in such moments as the 1968 Tet Offensive and the Euro-American upsurge which followed in time to be based in a lack, rather than be an affirming reflection of Eros itself. He also interestingly commented on his view of the closeness between Marxism and nihilism, given that the former philosophy would have the proletariat abolish its own self in the process of overcoming capitalism. George Katsiaficas himself then intervened, associating his take on the Eros effect with the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious; he proudly declared the Eros effect to be a concrete expression of the idea that the human spirit is indomitable, and—disagreeing implicitly with Thompson—that it speaks to humanity’s biological need for socialism and freedom. Bringing up the example of the 1980 Gwanju uprising in Korea, which can be likened to another Paris Commune, Katsiaficas asserted that the people’s love for each other becomes even more important than life itself in moments of an activated Eros, and he hypothesized the Eros effect might be taken to represent one explanation for the emergence of the radical wave of People’s Power in East Asia (1986-1992). After Katsiaficas spoke Kellner, who asked to what extent the embodied strength of Thanatos—as in the world’s military and police apparatuses—poses challenges to an erotic politics; he also sought to connect Eros to the development of a different relationship between humans and nature. I will leave the final word for Imaculada Kangussu, who from the audience remarked on the similarity between Katsiaficas’s account of the Eros effect and Kant’s idea of enthusiasm, or the sublime fusion of affect, idea, and imagination, which is capable of inspiring events that overturn the course of world history.—————————————————————————————————————-